‘There be money to be gotten by foolery’: Jacobean City comedy and commercial metatheatre

There's Meat and Money Too:Rich Widows and Allegories of Wealth in Jacobean City Comedy Elizabeth Hanson One of my favorite characters in the drama of early modern England is the rich mercer's widow Taffata in Lording Barry's city comedy Ram-Alley. Independently wealthy, in complete control of her household, endowed not only with sexual appetites but with the power to gratify them, and despite all this, never the subject of moral censure, Taffata seems to be on permanent holiday from early modern gender ideology. She first appears on a balcony with her maid, checking out passing men until she is sufficiently taken with one to drop her handkerchief, whereupon he is instantly smitten by her. But she quickly loses interest in him and seems bent on a socially advantageous marriage to an elderly courtier, Sir Oliver Smallshanks, only to throw him over at last for his bankrupt son, Will Smallshanks. It must be admitted that this outcome occurs only after she has been taken prisoner at sword point by Will, who informs her that her options are to marry him or to have her head cut off, after which he will kill himself because he would "rather dye / Then in a street live poore and lowsily."1 Yet what is remarkable about the scene is the way in which, despite the apparent coerciveness of the situation and Will's obviously mercenary motives, the power still seems to reside with Taffata. She gets what she wants, and Will's antics are represented as the necessary display of sexual potency which leads her to choose the "lusty lad / That winnes his widdow with his well drawne blade" (R, 2249-50) as Taffata affectionately calls her new husband, over an old man who, in his son's charitable words, "stinks at both ends" (R, 2214). Taffata is a favorite character of mine because she affords a pleasure rarely vouchsafed me by the drama of the period: I think it would be fun to be her. What's more, insofar as it is Taffata's choice that disposes the social order of the play's comic conclusion, she seems to me to hold out a utopian prospect, to shadow forth a world organized around women as powerful subjects of desire. [End Page 209] Thus it is with regret that I announce that this essay will argue that Taffata does not really represent a woman, at least not in quite the same way that Will Smallshanks represents a man. Rather, I want to suggest, she, and numerous characters like her in many other plays of the period—not just city comedy widows but also a character such as Portia in The Merchant of Venice—enjoy their extraordinary freedom and power because they are allegorical figures for wealth, survivals of morality plays and interludes in which money is frequently represented as a powerful woman. More generally, I want to explore the relationship, in the plays which use the rich widow figure, between two apparently antithetical mimetic modes, realism and allegory. My argument will be that the realism of city comedies like Ram-Alley, with its claim to show the actual texture of social life, is haunted by allegory with its implicit assertion that the literal level of representation stands for something else. If we must read these plays with attention to the historical position of women in the period, particularly with respect to the status of widows, we must also attend to representational traditions which urge upon us a hermeneutic of abstraction, a movement away from women as historical subjects and toward things which they can be made to signify. Any attempt to understand the way gender ideology functions in these plays must also consider the interplay of mimetic modes in their representation. In attending to the mimetic modes of these plays my intention is also to broach a larger theoretical question: in what ways can culture, understood as the material relations and ways of thinking and feeling which define a particular place and time and locate it in history, be present in a literary text? Over the last twenty years a critical consensus has been established that the purpose of explicating...

Rhetoric, Anxiety, and the Pleasures of Cuckoldry in the Drama of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton Gary Kuchar Many things that seem foul in the doing, do please, done. Jonson Psychoanalytic readings of early modern representations of cuckoldry generally consider the tendency of cuckolds (imaginary and real) to fantasize about their own cuckold scene as a strategy for coping with, or defending against, threats of emasculation. As Coppélia Kahn puts it in her influential study of masculinity in Shakespeare: to be betrayed by a woman [. ..] is to be humiliated or dishonored , and thus placed in a position of vulnerability that makes [the cuckold] psychologically like a castrated man, and thus womanish. To defend against the fear of such castration , men anticipate it in fantasy, and turn it against women by calling them whores. To be betrayed by a woman thus threatens a man's very masculinity—his identity as a man. (132) Kahn's thesis that the thought of being cuckolded serves a narcissistic defense against the fear of "psychosocial castration" convincingly applies to JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 31.1 (Winter 2001): 1-30. Copyright © 2001 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 2 JNT Shakespearean characters such as Othello, Leontes and even Master Ford of The Merry Wives of Windsor. However, it remains inadequate for understanding the dynamics of cuckold anxiety as it is represented in Jacobean city comedy, particularly that of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. The difference here lies in the way that in Jacobean city comedy the representation of the cuckold figure anticipates the central principle of Lacanian psychoanalysis that narcissistically motivated defenses generally conceal an underlying and symptomatically derived pleasure directly opposed to the defense itself. Indeed, insofar as Jonson's and Middleton's representation of cuckold anxiety involves an either manifest or latent acknowledgement of the husband's active role in his own cuckolding,—be it real or only potential—he operates according to the structure of Lacanian perversion . He "gets off, [that is], on the staging of the very operation (castration ) that is supposed to require a loss of jouissance. He derives satisfaction from the enactment of the very operation which demands that he separate from the source of his satisfaction" (Fink 192-3). Rather than simply anticipating his social castration as a means for warding off its humiliating effects, the cuckold figure in Jacobean city comedy purposefully or "inadvertently" pursues his own social castration, secretly delighting in the thought of his own humiliation at the hands of another man. To this extent , Jonson and Middleton invite their audience members to read beyond the narcissistic defense as a means for grasping the cuckold's "disguised or systematically unrecognized/misrecognized pleasure" (Fink 214) at the very thought of his own social castration. The spectator of Jacobean city comedy is thus, as Katherine Maus observes, "obliged to evaluate symptoms , behavior the cause of which may be hidden or withheld" (576). As such, the use of double-entendre, dramatic irony, and other rhetorical and theatrical devices in Jonson and Middleton not only invite, but indeed compel, their audience members to interpret psychoanalytically. My principle challenge in what follows, then, is to demonstrate how the strange pleasures of emasculation which the acquiescent cuckold—or, more properly, wittol—derives from being cuckolded are encoded and to account for the distressing and/or alleviating significance that this encoding has for the way that Jacobean city comedy represents male anxieties regarding adultery and the integrity of early modern social relations more generally. What emerges from such an analysis is the recognition that the acquiescent cuckold or wittol functions in these plays as a social symp- Rhetoric, Anxiety, and the Pleasures of Cuckoldry 3 torn, a literalized embodiment, as it were, of socio-ideological antagonisms . By stigmatizing the wittol to varying degrees, Jonson and Middleton construct highly ambivalent modes of closure that simultaneously provoke and assuage male anxiety over female sexuality. To this extent, Jacobean city comedies do not simply defend against the potential cuckold 's anxiety over his emasculation, but like dream-work, they articulate —while more or less obscuring—the socially transgressive pleasure derived from the thought and experience of emasculation itself. I conclude by suggesting that Middleton...

There is, of course, nothing startling about the coupling of love and money on the stage. Marriage-seekers in dramatic comedy have always sought wealth as well the dowries of Glycerie in Terence's The Woman of Andros, of Millamant in Congreve's The Way of the World, and of Barbara Undershaft in Shaw's Major Barbara, for example, all figure prominently in the action of those plays, and are part of the conventions of the form. But the persistence with which certain Stuart playwrights dwelt upon economic theory and practice transcends those conventions, and makes their plays unique commentaries upon the economic life of the society which produced them. It is not necessary to believe, as some scholars do, that such writers as Marston, Dekker, Heywood, Jonson, and Middleton intended to depict, or did in fact depict, anything so majestic as The Rise of Capitalism itself. We need only acknowledge that many of the participants in that vast and ponderous upheaval substantial merchants, small shopkeepers, impoverished gentlemen, adventurers and entrepreneurs are portrayed with some realism in city comedies, and almost nowhere else. And though Brian Gibbons is correct in maintaining that these works not present in any useful sense 'a keen analysis in economic terms' ... of the actual conditions of the times,2 it is well to keep in mind the fact that, if the plays do not analyze economic

Among the many musical characters present in Jacobean city comedies as well as the broader canon of English Renaissance drama, Merrythought from Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle is undoubtedly one of the fullest and most vivid exemplifications of how characterization can be conducted via constant singing. This merry old man sings more than he speaks. His singing accounts for more than 140 lines, which is about twenty lines surplus of his speech. He believes in achieving mirth and health through much singing, a good portion of which has the pretext of conviviality, in particular, drinking. This article offers a dramaturgical study of how Merrythought’s songs form an indispensible component in this metatheatrical city comedy, while accommodating an expression of the contemporary belief in music’s duality.

With the publication of Brian Gibbons's Jacobean City Comedy thirty-five years ago, the urban satires by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton attained their 'official status as a Renaissance subgenre' that was distinct, by its farcical humour and ironic tone, from 'citizen comedy' or 'London drama' more generally. This retrospective genre-building has proved immensely fruitful in the study of early modern English drama; and although city comedies may not yet rival Shakespeare's plays in the amount of editorial work and critical acclaim they receive, both the theatrical contexts and the dramatic complexity of the genre itself, and its interrelations with Shakespearean drama justly command an increasing level of attention. Looking at a broad range of plays written between the 1590s and the 1630s - master-pieces of the genre like Eastward Ho, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Dutch Courtesan and The Devil is an Ass, blends of romance and satire like The Shoemaker's Holiday and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and bourgeois oddities in the Shakespearean manner like The London Prodigal - the twelve essays in this volume re-examine city comedy in the light of recently foregrounded historical contexts such as early modern capitalism, urban culture, the Protestant Reformation, and playhouse politics. Further, they explore the interrelations between city comedy and Shakespearean comedy both from the perspective of author rivalry and in terms of modern adaptations: the twenty-first-century concept of 'popular Shakespeare' (above all in the movie sector) seems to realign the comparatively time- and placeless Shakespearean drama with the gritty, noisy and bustling urban scene that has been city comedy's traditional preserve.

Literary scholars have long been aware of the near saturation of English Renaissance plays with marriage plots. Many Jacobean City Comedies, for example, use marriages to contrast traditional visions of society, formed around reciprocal obligations within a status hierarchy, with a more self-interested and contractual view of social relations. This chapter highlights links between marital contracts and financial contracts and considers changes in contractual thinking in the context of unprecedented litigation over conditional bonds; the displacement of dower by jointure in marital negotiations; and the increasingly contractual nature of private marital separations (in a society where divorce in the modern sense was unavailable).

The Dutch Courtesan Online Oliver Jones In June 2013, the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York staged John Marston’s Jacobean city comedy, The Dutch Courtesan (1605).1 Directed by Michael Cordner, the production marked the second early modern play staged in the new Department’s Scenic Stage Theatre, and extended an established series of explorations of early modern drama at York, which has seen seldom-performed plays returned to the modern stage. Since moving in to the Department’s new building in autumn 2010, the combination of colleagues’ expertise and well-equipped theaters and TV production facilities has made it possible to capture these performances on film. Following the success of the performances and recording of the Department’s inaugural production of Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters!, staged in June 2011, the Dutch Courtesan project sought to expand the ambitions of the former. The result was the creation of a new project website, www.dutchcourtesan.co.uk (Cordner and Jones). This site was envisaged as a vehicle by which to track the preparation of the play from script to performance and to offer a range of contextualizing information about the play’s history. Ultimately becoming host to the film of the performance, the website extends the duration of the production beyond its short three-day run and offers the user a version of what an audience saw in the theater, “remediated,” in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s term (qtd. in Aebischer 144), and presented among an assemblage of supporting materials ranging from scholarly theater-historical and literary essays to rehearsal blogs and films, and interviews with cast, creatives, and visiting industry professionals. The purpose of this essay is to explore the rationale of the project and the website’s creation, and to consider how viewing The Dutch Courtesan through the website lens shifts the way in which we might approach early modern texts in performance and on screen. [End Page 623] Rarely played: The Dutch Courtesan on the modern stage While this may be the most active period of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater-making since Shakespeare and his contemporaries wielded quills (Lopez, “Seeds” 35), one such contemporary, John Marston, has yet to enjoy the modern popularity of some of his peers. Against the works of Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, and the inevitably omnipresent Shakespeare, Marston’s plays have rarely made it to the modern professional stage. In Karin Brown’s extensive list of 50 years of professional productions of early modern theater in the UK and USA since 1960, only four out of 341 were of Marston’s plays (200-01). While we can add further productions to the list (see Douglas and Jones; Brown makes no claims to being completely comprehensive), a representation of a little over 1% of fifty years of early modern productions does not immediately suggest a hearty endorsement of Marston’s work. Nevertheless, the first production on Brown’s list might suggest that such circumspection was not always so strongly felt; for in 1964, in its second season, the National Theatre staged Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, directed by William Gaskill and Piers Haggard, at Chichester and the Old Vic. To choose the play for the theater’s first foray into non-Shakespearean drama from before the Restoration, out of the full range and richness of the known repertoire, suggests that the powers at the newly formed company saw Marston’s work as being exemplary classical drama, which drama had long been advocated as being a “vital” component in the remit and duty of a national theater to stage (Elsom and Tomalin qtd. in Cordner, “The Dutch Courtesan, 1964” 1). It was the success of two earlier productions of the play, directed by Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in 1954 and 1959, that led Kenneth Tynan to propose the play for inclusion the National’s second season (Cordner, “The Dutch Courtesan, 1964” 3-4; Tynan 507). However, Littlewood’s success was not replicated by Gaskill and Haggard. Branded “An Inhibited Booby” by the Times’ correspondent (“Inhibited”), and “depressing” and “ponderous” by Bamber Gascoigne, Tynan’s successor at the Observer, both the production...

In this highly original and energetic study, Theodore B. Leinwand views Jacobean theater particularly Jacobean city comedy as a measure of the way Londoners of the time perceived each other. In forming a sophisticated view of the relations between Jacobean comedy and life, Leinwand makes a solid contribution not only to Jacobean theater, but, more broadly, to our understanding of the cultural, social, and political contexts within which all literature is produced. Central to Leinwand s thesis is the belief that Jacobean theater was shaped by the city, and that in turn the theater both crystallized and criticized the attitudes of city dwellers for city dwellers. While The City Staged is an important study in its central focus, it becomes especially valuable when seen as a well-defined laboratory in which the vexing relationship between art and society may be studied.

Hoards of Whores: Onomastic Mutability in Jacobean City Comedy

The Displacement of the Market in Jacobean City Comedy

The London Prodigal as Jacobean City Comedy

Jacobean City Comedy and the Ideology of the City

“This gulph of marriage”: Jacobean city wives and Jacobean city comedy

Some 250 English comedies are set in London between circa 1600 and 1737. Three clichés about them remain current. First, “Jacobean city comedy” performs serious sociopolitical work. Second, the social level of the protagonists rises in the “comedy of wit” or “comedy of manners.” Third, “low” and “satirical” forms of comedy gradually gives way to “sentimental” and even “exemplary” comedy. None of these claims is more than very partly true. Throughout this span of time we find topical (City Politiques) and topographical (Covent Garden) comedy, social satire (The Provok’d Wife), ideological argumentation (The Country Gentleman), and ambivalent or ironic presentation of conflicted or unstable values (The Man of Mode). London can be fun (The Shoemaker’s Holiday), glamorous (The Lady of Pleasure), wicked (Friendship in Fashion), low (The Roaring Girl), ugly (The Wives Excuse), or allegorical (Albion and Albanius). The degree of realism varies drastically. The plays exhibit far greater diversity of attitude and are much more difficult to interpret with confidence than most critics have been willing to admit. We do well, therefore, to take them on a case-by-case basis, acknowledging that some are ambiguous, internally contradictory, or just plain opaque.

By examining two popular Jacobean city comedies, The Puritan (1606–1607) and Westward Ho (1604–1605), this article proposes that the rich lexicon of smells, outlining or residing within interior built spaces in each play, becomes a precarious signifier of restrictive forces of material expansion that at once challenge and build upon the more intimate nature of Jacobean private theaters. In so doing, it further argues that in early Stuart performances, references to smells not only were meant to evoke the materiality of stage and the bodies of actors and spectators, but significantly expanded drama's means of incorporating and probing into the material foundations of city life. The two plays also suggest that while Jacobean satirical drama employed odors to communicate concerns about London's restrictive conditions of living, it also used select venues to target ‘odor-conscious’ spectators who were more likely to respond to such fears.